Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Corporations Should Either Be Publicly Directed Or Lose Their Shareholder Liability-Limitation

Corporations have existed for some centuries, although very limited in numbers, purposes and durations until the nineteenth century (indeed, at the time of the US Declaration of Independence in 1776, they had been outlawed in Britain for half a century, under the Bubble Act), and one of the new advantages given to corporations toward the end of that century was limitation of liability of shareholders for corporate debt:

In other words, instead of shareholders being treated as partners each of which was liable for all corporate debt, shareholders' liabilities were limited by GOVERNMENT REGULATION to amounts corresponding to their shareholdings.

But the arrogance, the rapacity, the corruption and the brutality of the present-day corporocracy, American and global, makes it critical that these INSTITUTIONS be reined in.

And one way of doing this is giving corporations a choice:

Either their boards of directors are selected by random lottery on a yearly basis from among the citizens of the countries in which they do business, or they lose shareholder liability-limitation.